So, basically, something modern is anything that relates to today.Which begs another question: what makes NYC a modern city? In the past, NYC was the modern city of its times. It was always the city of today -- and tomorrow. But will it always be so?

Before contemplating the future, let's
look to the past. This recent segment from WNYC recounted the history
of how two men in the 1930s helped to shape modern New York: Mayor Fiorello
LaGuardia and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These two titans of
their era used the power of government to re-build a decaying city and
drastically improve the lives of its citizens. They had a progressive
vision: clean and affordable housing, good jobs with safe working
conditions, health care, and education. These services were provided and
improved in order to empower people in their lives and to help them to
contribute to the life of the city. FDR and LaGuardia saw progressive
policies not only as compassionate and moral but as smart and necessary
-- they helped people help society. Because
of these two leaders, NYC emerged from the Great Depression
and World War II to be the most powerful city in the most
powerful nation on earth -- the very zenith, the very cusp of
modernity.

Now, almost a century later, the city is again looking to the future -- and trying to define its modern identity.

Increasingly, we've become a city of rich
and poor with a dying middle class. If you're rich in this town, times
have never been better. But if you're not, they've never been this
tough.
If you can afford it, there's never been more luxury housing available.
If you're can't, there's never been less affordable housing available.
Schools are great -- if you can afford good private ones or live in the right neighborhoods. If you
don't, you're condemned to failing schools. These have been great times
for the rich, lucky and connected -- and terrible for everyone else.

For Mayor Bloomberg, he has worked very hard to regulate how much soda you drink but not how much you pay in rent. He has tried to make NYC a "luxury product" and not a city for all. Basically, he wants NYC to be Bergdorf Goodmans and, if you can't afford it, you can go shop at Target for all he cares.

To me, this is an unacceptable future for NYC.

So what will the future of NYC in the
21st century be like? Is our city going to go the way of Ancien France
or Tsarist Russia? Or can we make a change? Can we recapture the same
progressive spirit that saved this city almost a century ago?

We can't be a modern, progressive city without investing in our people. We can't have a city of rich and poor, squeezing everyone else out. A brain drain from NYC would be a disaster. As Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO show
Girls and a lifelong New Yorker put it: "We can't have our
generation's Patti Smith moving to Tampa."

That's why we need to elect Bill De
Blasio as our next mayor. He's the best progressive we can elect to
fashion a modern New York that closes the gap between rich and poor. He
has a simple, straightforward agenda that would go a long way to closing
this gap: impose a tax surcharge of .04 to 1% on incomes over half a
million dollars, universal pre-K, reform "stop and frisk", support a
living wage, and build affordable housing. Sounds like a good plan to me. A 21st century progressive plan that a leading American economist, Jeffrey Sachs, strongly endorses. And believe me, very few people are smarter than him.

Sounds good to you, right? I would hope so.

But not to some people -- like our
current mayor or the 1%. If De Blasio wins the Democratic primary -- as
it looks increasingly likely that he will -- it'll be a battle royale
between him and the Republican candidate.

Oh yes, there will be a lot of fear
mongering. "Oh no! If we elect De Blasio mayor, it'll be like the 1970s
again: high crime, fiscal crises, white flight!" Those arguments are
crap: this isn't the 1970s anymore, we have new accounting rules that
don't allow a fiscal crises to emerge, and crime has fallen so low
that I don't think that a mayor, any mayor, could just somehow make it
flare up again. No, the city is facing new a crises: affordability,
quality of life, fairness, justice. Without these, NYC can't be a truly
modern city.

The last presidential election showed
that American is moving in a more progressive direction. With Obama in
the White House, America is moving forward. Does NYC want to be left
behind?

If we are to truly be a modern city, we
need to move in a more progressive direction and, for that, we need
progressive leadership. For mayor, De Blasio is the way to go.